bikeshedding

Etymology

bikeshed +‎ -ing. The term was coined as a metaphor to illuminate Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively. It was popularized in the Berkeley Software Distribution community by Poul-Henning Kamp^[1] and has spread from there to the software industry at large.

Noun

bikeshedding (uncountable)

1. Futile investment of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues.
2. Procrastination.

Verb

bikeshedding

1. simple past tense and past participle of bikeshed

See also

• yak shaving
• when you're up to your neck in alligators, it's hard to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp

References